Page 44 of Tidal Creatures

Erin jerks her chin upward instead of nodding, an almost-challenging gesture. “If that’s not a problem, I will,” she says. “You’ve invited me to stay before. I assumed the invitation was still open.”

“Your new apprentice is good luck!” burbles Catrina. “We’ve been trying to entice the mysterious Erin to join us since Smita first started coming around.”

“I’m not one of your little witches,” says Erin. “Smita can do what she wants, and she knows I’ll support her in whatever that is, even when it’s coming here.” She smiles at Smita, heart-meltingly gentle, and Smita smiles back, a little more reserved. “But that doesn’t mean I’m in a hurry to sign up for your club. I’m just going to watch today’s meeting, then have a chat with your ‘cousin’ when it’s finished.”

“All right then, I suppose we begin,” says Isabella, with a clap of her hands. “Everyone, this is my cousin, Kelly. Kelly, this is everyone. She’s going to be training under me as an hechicera, but as we all know, the hechicera’s art is not incompatible with witchcraft, and so it seemed wise to bring her to today’s meeting. Her mother sent her to stay with me because as she gets older, her potential gets stronger, and untrained, she could do serious damage.”

Kelpie smiles hesitantly and waves to the room. It seems like the right thing to do. This accomplished, she flees to sit next to Isabella, who pats her on the shoulder and leans in close.

“You did well,” she says, voice low. “Now try to look like I’ve just said something terribly important and wise.”

Kelpie widens her eyes, turning her chin just a little, so that her head is tilted more toward Isabella.

“Very good. I’m going to start the meeting now, and afterward, you can chat with Erin and Smita. All right?”

Kelpie nods. Isabella begins.

The coven meeting opens with something they call “calling the quarters,” which involves invoking four out of the five basic alchemical principles and asking them to become embodied in the room. Kelpie watches intently as this goes on, but none of the elements appear. These women, whatever they are or aren’t doing, aren’t somehow summoning manifestations out of nothing.

Which is probably for the best, since if they were, the alchemists would hound them to the ends of the earth for being able to accomplish such a vast and terrible working.

Each quarter is called by a different member of the group, with Isabella assigning the elements according to her “inner eye,” which Kelpie assumes means “her whim.” She closes her eyes and turns in a slow circle with one hand held out, then stops and points. When she opens her eyes, whoever she was pointing at is the one who calls that quarter.

Unsurprisingly, Catrina calls water. Smita calls fire. Angeline—the one whose cousin was tapped to serve the seasons—calls air, and a fourth woman calls earth, and Isabella declares the circle open. With her last word, candles around the edges of the room burst into flame, bright and dancing, filling the air with shadows. None of the coven members seem surprised, although Catrina slants a small, mean look over at Kelpie, clearly waiting to see surprise in her expression, and she appears disappointed when it isn’t there. As if she needs to be part of such a marvelous thing that it inspires shock and awe in the unprepared.

She might have done better to watch Erin. The blonde’s eyes widen when the candles start to burn, eyebrows raising toward her hairline, and while the moment of surprise doesn’t last long, the calm that follows seems almost inhuman, more something suited to a praying mantis watching an insect’s approach.

Each of the women of Isabella’s coven has brought questions or concerns, workings they’d like to see performed. Workings for luck, or for money, or for love. Catrina’s working is for power, which is a little bit surprising; she doesn’t seem like the sort of person who’d be searching for power. Then Kelpie looks at the way she watches Isabella, the envy in her eyes, and she understands.

Isabella can see her for what she truly is, and she isn’t surprised by Catrina’s request for power. Whatever an hechicera is, it’s something powerful enough to touch the scraps of wild magic that still linger in the world, free of alchemical control. Catrina doesn’t have that. She knows it exists, she sees it in some of the women she invites into her home, and while Kelpie isn’t any great student of human nature, she doesn’t need to be if she’s going to understand that some people will always want what they don’t have. For someone like Catrina, who gets the biggest house and the most comfortable chair, knowing that magic is real when she’s unable to touch it must be deeply frustrating.

Kelpie wonders, as the meeting and the castings continue, whether Isabella welcomes Catrina in her coven because the woman would be an easy recruit for the local alchemists, who aren’t shy about offering power for nothing more than devotion, dedication, and money. She’s spoken to the other lab assistants, the ones who view their time in Margaret’s lab as training before they move on to their glorious and inevitable futures. Many of them have told essentially that same story. They brushed against something once that made them realize there was more to reality than they knew; they went chasing it; they found the alchemists, and it wasn’t until they were in too deep to walk away that they realized any power they acquired would be on the other end of a long and arduous journey.

Not everyone who yearned for power could be recruited by the alchemists, or there would be a lot more of them, and probably a lot less of everyone else, given their tendency to dismantle what they didn’t need.

Only the day before, she’d considered herself one of them, and had been able to justify all these things as necessary and even good. Kelpie frowns. How did she change her mind so quickly? She sinks into her own thoughts, trying to follow the thread of logic, trying to understand herself before she has to explain it to anyone else, and she finds an answer. Whether it’s the right one or not doesn’t matter as much as the fact that she has one.

In the lab, she had one source of input, and it came from the alchemists who trained and took care of her. It was always flat, always one-sided and absolutely sure of its moral convictions. There were no shades of gray, no complex questions. The only thing she’s ever been asked to see in two lights at once was Asphodel Baker, and even that had been an accident.

Asphodel was the one who created the cuckoos, the one who pushed the bounds of alchemical knowledge in ways that have yet to be surpassed, even by her own student and creation.

True constructs, like Leigh Barrow, could become alchemists, could learn party tricks and simple rituals, but they could never truly innovate, could never become fully human, could never surpass their creators. Cuckoos, though … Asphodel Baker had been able to tap into the Promethean fire at the heart of all things, using it to shape a recipe that crafted life itself, true humanity, capable of innovation and exploration, even embodiment. All the world’s alchemists working for all the world’s centuries had never been able to tap into and capture natural forces, not before Asphodel came along and changed the game for everyone.

And the Congress reviles her. They hate her for being smarter than they were, for being a woman in a time when women weren’t meant to be allowed anywhere near a lab, for refusing to let the second fact of her existence eclipse the first and send her discreetly and demurely into darkness. They use what she created, gladly and without hesitation, but they’re more likely to credit it to Reed than to Asphodel, even though he was her creation to begin with. They make her out to be the villain, all because she refused to go away.

Kelpie first learned about her from some of the apprentices when they were talking in the cafeteria, casually trading theories and bits of their own work. Information was currency in the lab, and she didn’t have any, so she’d always been reduced to eavesdropping, trying to understand the world without being able to barter her way into true enlightenment. The apprentices talked about Asphodel like she was a miracle, the woman who single-handedly dragged American alchemy into the modern age. Her death had been a tragedy; her life, a transcendence of all norms and standards.

So she asked Margaret about this Asphodel person, who sounded absolutely amazing, and had been baffled when Margaret replied with the official Congressional position on Asphodel: it was fine to use her research, because it had all been performed with stolen Congressional resources anyway, and she should have known her place. It was fine to claim her accomplishments. It was not fine to think well of her in any way.

That was Kelpie’s first conflict, and it’s one she still carries with her now, in this sun-soaked room, surrounded by women she barely knows. She wonders if any of them have heard of the Up-and-Under, or Asphodel, or anything else. She doesn’t know how to ask.

It’s easy to think the alchemists who were her sole companions until now may have lied to her, because she knows they lied to her.

They told her she was human.

Once she makes space in her mind for that lie, all the others become easy to believe.

The workings are drawing to a close, the air thick with herbs and dried flowers, some crushed and sprinkled, some added to small bowls of purified water, some burnt. Bowls of small, precious stones have appeared at some point, and more of the crushed-up flowers have been mixed in, meaning that all four of the invoked elements have been involved. Kelpie wonders if they know how close they tread to alchemy in the design of their workings. The four static elements, and then flowers to stand in for living things, which walk the ways of aether. Add a few more controls and some good warding seals, and this could have been a rite to purify glassware, or to return life to a dead beetle.